The Dialogue Lacan/Kojeve on Bureaucracy and on Empire.

by Eric Laurent (Paris)

translated by Rivka Warshawsky

The contribution of psychoanalysis to political science and to the
interpretation of the social bond does not confine itself to the Church
and the Army as is often the impression upon reading the literature.
Before arriving at the Lacanian writing of the discourses, we should not
forget an intermediary mesh link, the analysis of bureaucracies such as
Lacan had thereupon conducted. He did not do it alone. He proceeded
with the Freudian operation on a conception of bureaucracy derived from that
of Alexandre Kojeve. The latter professed a doctrine of what we could
call *generalised bureaucracy* . Lacan adds therein the grain of sand
of jouissance, with surprising consequences.
What is a bureaucracy in this sense? We have forgotten how the
development of organisations as instruments of administration was
generalised during a period of reconstruction of the world that follwed
the second World War. We often limit the phenomenon to that of the
establishment of the bureaucracy necessary to the functioning of the
*Welfare State*. Many other bureaucracies have emerged and have
installed themselves in our landscape in order to administer larger and larger
social ensembles, both national and international. There have been
bureaucracies destined to administer the economy, diverse
reconstructions, projects, made to foil crises. Then the bureaucracies
of financial industry: the banks, essential to anti-crisis devices. One
must add to this the domain which changes its regulations with the new
functions of the provident-state: insurance. Internationally, every new
field comes to be launched with new International Institutions.
Beginning with, of course, military pacts. Following that, the United Nations and
all their annexes. Then, the whole European project, which takes diverse
forms. From the Economic Community of Coal and Steel (CECA) upto the
European Economic Community (CEE). Post Stalinistic Russia itself
becomes a bureaucracy, devoured by multiple competing bureaucracies. In America,
the multinationals attain an unprecedented degree of integration. Let us
stop there. There have been those who thought that the phenomenon could not be
described in univocal terms. The ownership of the means of production
was the radical discriminant which rendered the phenomenon equivocal. In
opposition, Alexandre Kojeve reads there the very realisation of the
Hegelian vision of History, on a new scale. In the preceding century,
Hegel situates the *bureaucratic* stratum facing civilised society. He
gives the place to a new clericature of functionaries of the universal.
Kojeve considers that the war aftermath confirms the world of
bureaucracies in a world where not only the clerk, but also the
warrier, have both disappeared in the modern technical army. For him, the form
which the ownership of capital takes matters very little, it is the
extension of the bureaucratic form which is the essential element of
civilisation, even more so than the technique which is an instrument for
it. He immediately draws from this a practical consequence for himself.
This wise sage par excellence reabsorbs himself in the bureaucracy of
international negotiations at the heart of french administration,
beginning from the moment when he was certain that the end of history
was taking place, he did not remain longer than to negotiate that which
could have brought about the univeral homogeneous State.
For Kojeve the principle of differentiation came from another source. He
launches it in a text which remained unpublished for a long time.
*The modern State, the actual political reality, requires bases of a
larger size than those represented by the Nations properly speaking. To
be politically viable, the modern State must rest on a vast imperial
union of allied Nations. The modern State is not truly a state as much as it
is an empire(1).* This modern form of empire can no longer be a
universal form like the one perfected by Rome whose fiction continued
with Byzantium. Kojeve saw in it at least three, issuing from the
aftermath of the war. The American or Anglo Saxon empire, the
Slavo-Sovietic empire and he proposed that Europe would make itself into
a Latin empire. It is in this real of three empires that different ways of living were
traced out for the Sage, living the end of history which announced the
general satisfaction with mass consumption and bourgeois comfort, terms
employed by Kojeve, but which could be replaced by the ideal production
of a generalised middle class. We could not define that which is here
named *relationship* more precisely than as a mode of enjoyment
(jouir). This *relationship* between Nations, which actually becomes a primordial
political factor, is a concrete undeniable fact having nothing at all to
do with the generally vague and uncertain ideas regarding race. The
relationship between Nations is above and before all a relationship of
language, of civilisation, of general mentality where one also can say-
of climate. And this spiritual relationship is translated amongst other
ways as identity of religion(2).* He therefore assigns a line of
partition between the anglo saxon, protestant world, which for him
predicts the rapid inclusion of Germany within the ensemble, and the
orthodoxe Slavic world and the catholicism of the Latin world.
Kojeve's catholicsm is particular and cannot be defined in its
essentials by dogma or ideals. This is a mentality which knew how to keep its place
in the Roman *OTIUM* *this mentality is characterised in that it has a
specificity through this art of leisure which is the source of art in
general, by the aptitude of creating this sweetness of living which has
nothing to do with material comfort,...which thus allows the
transformation of simple bourgeois well-being to aristocratic softness
and elevates it frequently even to joy, the pleasures which, in a
different ambience would be vulgar pleasures. *Kojeve here knowingly
diverts, to the benfit of his own perspective , the
protestant-capitalism unity established by Weber which the text cites in a generic fashion. He proposes a *pooling alliance* around a mode of enjoyment which can
specify the bourgeois comfort, can bestow on it a form which it did not
before possess. This repartition of Kojeve leaves aside Asia, which he
was nevertheless very well acqainted with, being at an early stage an
eminent Sinologist. He later would situate China as a variant of Russian
communism. It was during his voyage to Japan in 1959 that he was to
recognise in the Japanese mode of enjoyment a completely original way
which he would qualify as Snobism (3), being *a state of living within
the function of totally formalised values, ie. empty of any human
content in a historical sense (4).* In 1945, he leaves the other two empires a probable
advantage in the register of the work, he centers the particularity of the Latin
empire on the perfection which it can bestow on repose.
Lacan adopts and criticises the Kojevian perspective on bureaucracies.
(To be continued)

(1)Kojeve (A.), Esquisse d'une doctrine de la politique francaise
(1945), in "La Regle du jeu", no. 1, mai 1990, Paris.
(2) "Ibid.", p.103.
(3) This notation announces the discovery of a Japanese mode of
enjoyment
opening the way moreover to a fourth empire. Dominique Auffret, in her
excellent biography, follows Koeve affirming that it is not till after
59 that he gives consistance to this perspective of a non animality or
uniformity of the end of history (A. Kojeve, Grasset, 1990, p.341). Is
it not since 1945 that the end of history leaves for him place for the
different modes of enjoyment of mass consumption or bourgeois comfort?
It is at least the perspective here proposed.
(4) Kojeve (A.), "Introduction a la lecture de Hegel", Premiere
edition 1947, Seconde Edition, Gallimard, 1968, p. 437. Here it
concerns the additional note of 1968.

(translated by Rivka Warshawsky)

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